FREEDOM AS

FOUNDATION FOR
MORAL ACTS
Subtitle
 Frank Sinatra’s Song “ My Way”

 https://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_hJ8-ZJcgo
Ethics Applies only to Human Persons

Unlike the lower

forms of animals,
human persons have
a choice or freedom,
hence morality
applies only to human
persons.
Freedom and Moral Choice

…making moral choice is

a necessary consequence
for being free, a
consequence of being a
human person.
To Be Ethical: Own Not Merely Abide by Moral
Standards

Because a human “Follow the rule or

person has freedom, law, even if the sky
s/he has a choice and
so is responsible for falls down”
the consequences of “The law is hard,
his/her choice. but it is the law.”
Owning moral standards means
internalizing them, making them part
of your conviction. Internalized or
embodied moral standards are being
followed with or without anyone telling
you.
CULTURE: HOW IT DEFINES MORAL
BEHAVIOR
When you hear the word culture, what comes to your mind?
 “Culture is the integrated pattern of human
knowledge, beliefs and behaviors. This
consists of language, ideas, customs, morals,
laws, taboos, tools, institutions, techniques,
and works of art, rituals and other capacities
and habits acquired by a person as a member
of the society”.
 Culture is the set of means used by mankind to become
more virtuous and reasonable in order to become fully
human.
 Sociologists categorize culture into material and non-
material culture:
 Nonmaterial culture – language, values, rules, knowledge
and meanings shared by members of society.
 Material culture – the physical object that a society
produces – tools, streets, homes, and toys, to name a few.”
Enculturation

 - is a process of learning from infancy till death, the

components of life in one’s culture.

 In the said process of learning, a person grows into a

culture, acquires competence in that culture and that culture
takes root in that person and becomes the cognitive map,
the term of reference for acting.
 African girls
 Inculturation
 - refers to the “missiological process in which the Gospel is
rooted in a particular culture and the latter is transformed
by its introduction to Christianity.”
 It is a two-way process: it roots the Gospel in a culture and
introduces that transformed culture to Christianity. For
example: to root the Gospel in the African culture is to
initiate two events.
 The first event is to transform the African culture of oppressing women into a
culture where men and women are treated as human persons equal in dignity,
tights and privileges.
 The second is to develop the African culture’s latent potential towards the
human development of the woman, created like her male counterpart in the
image and likeness of God.
 The other aspect is to introduce the woman a meaningful place among the
agents of inculturation.
Acculturation

 - is the ‘cultural modification of an individual group, or

people by adapting to or borrowing traits from another
culture.”
There are practices that should be stopped because of the painful harm they do.
Circumcision of women in Africa.
Culture definitely affects the way we
evaluate and judge things.
Culture affects human behaviour.
Cultural Relativism

 - is the idea that a person’s beliefs, values, and

practices should be understood based on that
person’s own culture, rather than be judged against
the criteria of another”.
Cultural relativism

 - is the view that moral or ethical systems, which vary from

culture to culture, are all equally valid and no one system is
really “better’ than any other. This is based on the idea that
there is no ultimate standard of good or evil, so every
judgment about right or wrong is a product of society.
 Any opinion on morality or ethics is subject to the cultural
perspective of each person. Ultimately, this means that no
moral or ethical system can be considered the “best” or
“worst” and no particular moral or ethical position can
actually be considered “right” or “wrong”.
 If we hold on to strict cultural relativism, it is not
possible to say that human sacrifice is “wrong” or
that respect for the elderly is “right”. After all, those
are products of the culture. This takes any talk of
morality right over the cliff, and into meaningless
gibberish.
 End